


Of Mice-catchers and Men

by notoneforreality



Series: QB-B3 007 Fest 2020 [26]
Category: James Bond (Craig movies)
Genre: 007 Fest, 007 Fest 2020, Alternate Universe - Different First Meeting, Bond meets the cats, First Meetings, Gen, Prompt Fill, Q's cats - Freeform, Team Q Branch, before Q, mainly Ram
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-26
Updated: 2020-07-26
Packaged: 2021-03-05 00:07:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,526
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25485178
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notoneforreality/pseuds/notoneforreality
Summary: James finds a cat outside his door while he's camping out in the war tunnels following his return from death.Later, he meets the owner.
Series: QB-B3 007 Fest 2020 [26]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1795726
Comments: 4
Kudos: 63





	Of Mice-catchers and Men

**Author's Note:**

> Written for--  
> This prompt from the 2019 anon list: alternate 00Q first meeting: after returning to MI6 following the bombing, Bond finds a cat yowling outside his temporary hide-out; he wasn't to know that the cat belongs to his new Quartermaster when he shares his dinner with the hungry thing

The ball of sandy fur outside James door assesses him with narrowed, yellow green eyes, then opens its mouth and yowls.

James panics.

Just a little, but he’s been back and holing up in the war tunnels for two days and he’s missed so much even before you take into account that they’re in a whole new base now. Does Six have cats now? Is it for rats in the tunnels? Does it have a name?

The cat yowls again and James decides these are questions he can ask a human later. In the meantime, he’s not seen any signs telling people not to feed the cat, so he goes and fetches his mostly-empty dinner plate and sets the last few bites of tuna down for the cat to eat.

“Good boy,” he whispers, stroking the cat’s head as nibbles at the food. He hopes he’s not going to cause problems by feeding the inexplicable cat.

The cat turns up again the next day at the same time, just as James is leaving with his dinner to return it to the hastily-modernised kitchen area. He hasn’t got anything left on his plate, but he crouches down to scritch the cat behind the ears, then sighs and scoops him up into one arm.

“Come on, you. We’ll get you some food.”

He leaves the cat outside the kitchen to avoid a health hazard, and then comes back out to find it sat cleaning one paw with a sharp eye on the door to the kitchen. James grins and sets down a bowl of minced beef that he found in the fridge.

The cat mewls at him, and then sets very happily to eating the food provided.

James grins at the creature. It looks healthy and well fed, so someone other than he is looking after it, which means it’s not a stray. No one’s mentioned anything about cats, although James hasn’t spoken to many people beyond M, Tanner, and the new bloke, Mallory.

On the third day, the cat actually scratches at his door. James is prepared, today, with his own meal half finished and a bowl of actual cat food he’d managed to buy from a shop across the river. Some of the agents he passed on the way in gave him odd looks, but no one seemed particularly surprised. The cat must be a known entity, then.

The cat finishes its dinner just after James, and immediately leaps up into James’ lap, purring and butting its head against James’ arm. His instinct is to complain about fur on his suit, but the rumbling contentment of the cat puts him at ease, somehow.

“You know what you want and how to get it, don’t you,” he says to the cat. “Cheeky bastard.”

Cheeky Bastard returns punctually for dinner every day, and stays for about half an hour until James lets him back out to roam free or home or wherever he goes. The half hours are the most relaxed James has felt in a long while, despite the fact that the hours around them are spent with him desperately trying not to show how badly he’s coping with the training and assessments, and the bunker around them is tense, trying to fight an unknown and invisible enemy.

A week and a half into the ritual, Cheeky Bastard jumps up onto James’ lap after dinner as usual, and James scrolls through news articles on his phone as usual, his left hand brushing through Cheeky Bastard’s fur as usual.

And then he wakes up the next morning with a furry weight on his chest. Not as usual.

“Oi, Cheeky Bastard,” he says, when he’s cleared all the fur away from his mouth. “Don’t you have a home you should have slept at?”

At no point in the past week and a half has James received an explanation for the cat — not that he’s asked at all — but he’s fairly sure that someone must look after him. Someone who might be concerned that he’s disappeared all night.

James sighs and pushes himself upright. He’s still wearing yesterday’s clothes, so he checks that the door is safely closed to contain the cat, and then goes for a shower. When he gets back, dressed in clean clothes, Cheeky Bastard eyes him grumpily, but it doesn’t take much coaxing before he’s snuggled safely in James arms.

The old Double-oh One had asked James, once, if he had any soft edges. He said James was all sharp and solid and bristling. That had made James bristle even more, and tell Double-oh One that soft edges were dangerous.

He wonders what Double-oh One would say if he saw James stalking the tunnels of MI6 with a glare on his face and a cat nestled in his arms, purring.

A few of the people James runs into stare. Another couple blink and then whisper amongst themselves. One young man startles so badly he tips a mug of tea over himself. James rolls his eyes.

It’s not long before someone recognises the cat. A young woman with a fuzz of purple hair squints at James’ arms and says, “Is that Q’s cat?”

“I didn’t think Boothroyd had a cat,” James says.

The woman blinks at him. “Where have you been? Boothroyd’s not Quartermaster, anymore.”

When did that happen? 

“Dead,” James says, instead of asking.

“Yeah, in the explosion at Vauxhall,” the woman sighs. It takes a moment for James to realise that she thinks she’s answering his question.

“Oh, no,” he says. “You asked where I’ve been.”

She squints again, at him this time rather than at Cheeky Bastard.

“Oh. You must be Bond.”

James inclines his head, and she does the same, then tells him to follow her.

“Q’s been panicking all night,” she says as they walk. “Where did you find him?”

“In my room,” James says. She raises her eyebrow but doesn’t comment, just continues leading him down a maze of tunnels in a route he hasn’t taken before.

The journey ends in an open office filled with more screens than people, one wall almost covered in them, huge and scrolling through reams of data that James can’t understand any of.

In front of the huge screen on the wall, a tall man with curly black hair balances a laptop on one arm and types with the other, joining the clicking and tapping sound that fills the room.

“Oi, Q,” calls the woman who led James here, and the man turns around. He’s young, with glasses and a frown, but it clears when he spots Cheeky Bastard in James’ arms. As soon as he clicks his tongue, Cheeky Bastard perks up and leaps out of James’ arms, trotting across to wind around Q’s ankles until he picks him up.

James shoves his hands in his pockets and strolls over to the large table in front of Q and the screens. Another woman joins them, brushing her fingers over Cheeky Bastard’s head as he purrs.

“Thanks, Connie,” she says to James’ guide, who grins and waves before disappearing off deeper into what James assumes is the new Q-Branch.

“You must be Q, then,” James says. 

The man turns a calculating gaze on him, and then nods. “I’m Q, this is R.”

“Nice to meet you both,” James says, offering his hand. R shakes it, Q doesn’t. James shrugs and puts it back in his pocket. “I was wondering who Cheeky Bastard belonged to. He’s been coming to me for dinner for nearly two weeks.”

“You called him Cheeky Bastard?” Q sounds absolutely scandalised. “He’s not a bastard, he’s an angel.”

R snorts, and James just catches a glimpse of Q’s baleful eyes as he turns them on her.

“Rom is an angel,” she says. “Ram is an uppity little shit.”

Q harrumphs. “Still better than a bastard. You just still think you’re a pharaoh, don’t you?”

The cat flicks his tail imperiously and James thinks the answer to that question is ‘yes’.

“Ram?”

That makes Q look inexplicably nervous, while R grins over his shoulder. 

“Rameses,” Q says. “Romulus is around here somewhere, because he’s been good and stayed in the branch. They don’t usually come in with me, but I haven’t been home more than one day a week recently, and they need to be looked after.”

“You should get some rest,” James says. He doesn’t really know why he says it, but he does, and Q glares at him.

“Oh, of course, Double-oh Seven,” he says, and it shouldn’t be a surprise that he knows who James is, even though James didn’t know he existed until five minutes ago. “You can definitely lecture me on safe work practises.”

R snorts at that, then steps in front of Q, who’s gone back to cooing at Cheeky Bastard Rameses.

“Well, Bond, while you’re here, we might as well make use of you. Come on.”

James throws one last look at Q, before following R, and sees him folded over the cat in his arms, expression soft and gentle.

‘Oh no,’ James thinks, and then turns and walks away before anything more dangerous can happen. 

**Author's Note:**

> Keep notes:  
> \--just a tiny little thing bc I think I might be dying and I need a break but this was a cute prompt  
> \--oh ffs I swear I meant this to be like 600 words max  
> \--lmao Q everyone knows you're a nerd stop being so awkward about your cats' names  
> \--Q; he's an angel! not a bastard! R: lmao two days ago he nearly scratched your face off bc you looked away from him for more than ten seconds and yesterday he ripped up half your blueprints  
> \--the ending is naff because I really am exhausted and need a break and I couldn't see how else to end it I apologise


End file.
